Can there be teaching if there is not some kind
of definable learning?

What is the relationship of teaching and learning?

When and how is teaching most powerfully enacted?

And who or what is most responsible for learning:
the environment? the teacher? the learner?
or some larger notion of participating together in a community?

And what do our answers to these questions mean
for how we should
organise education and teacher-student relationships?

Rogoff, Matusov, and White (1996) argue that ‘coherent patterns
of instructional practices are based on instructional models, and instructional
models are based on theoretical perspectives on learning'. Recent research
indicates that teachers usually hold implicit theories about teaching
and learning that inform their planning and day-to-day decision making.
Yet these theories are typically underarticulated, unrecognised, underspecified,
and quite often inconsistent if not schizophrenic in their application.
It is our contention that clearly stating and coming to understand one's
theory (or theories) about teaching and learning can help us to develop
a coherent instructional model and then to scrutinise, converse about,
and adapt our teaching in ways that hold powerful benefits for teachers
and students.

The kind of teaching that most typifies American middle and high school
classrooms is that the teacher tells and the student listens, then the
student tells (or regurgitates information on a written test) and the
teacher evaluates. The knowledge is declarative, decontextualised, and
inert (think of a classroom dominated by lecture). Knowledge is not personally
constructed nor applied. More progressive teaching is seen when teachers
model strategies and knowledge making in the context of task completion,
and then students attempt to do the task the way the teacher did it. Vygotsky's
notion of instruction would have teachers doing complex tasks in meaningful
contexts with students helping as much as they can. Through repetitions
of the task, students take on more and more of the responsibility, with
the teacher helping as needed and naming the new strategies employed by
the student. Eventually students do the task on their own. The learning
here is directed by a teacher who models appropriate strategies for meeting
particular purposes, guides students in their use of the strategies, and
provides a meaningful and relevant context for using the strategies. Support,
in the form of explicit teaching, occurs over time until students master
the new strategies, and know how and when to use them.

In the learning-centred teaching process, the teacher first models a
new strategy in the context of its use and students watch. As this is
done, the teacher will talk through what the strategy is, when the strategy
should be used, and how to go about using it. The next step on the continuum
is for the teacher to engage in the task with the students helping out.
The third step is for students to take over the task of using the strategy
with the teacher helping and intervening as needed. Finally, the student
independently uses the strategy and the teacher watches. If particular
students are more advanced, they may skip ahead to a later point on the
continuum. If, on the other hand, students experience difficulty using
a strategy in a particular situation, the teacher may have to move back
a step by providing help, or taking over the task and asking students
to help.

There is clearly a need for this kind of active and sustained support
for improving reading through the middle and high school years. The time
is right for these Vygotskian notions of guiding reading to be widely
adopted in our schools. The learning-centred teaching process that we
are arguing for requires Explicit Teaching.

Both teacher and student are passive; curriculum determines the
sequence of timing of instruction.

Students have biological limits that affect when and how they can
learn; teachers must now ‘push’ students beyond the limits.
Knowledge is a ‘natural’ product of development.

All knowledge is socially and culturally constructed. What and how
the student learns depends on what opportunities the teacher/parent
provides. Learning is not ‘natural’ but depends on interactions
with more expert others.

Student’s role

‘Empty vessel’

Active constructor

Collaborative participant

Teacher’s role

Transmit the curriculum

Create the environment in which individual learner can develop in
set stages-implies single and natural course

The student: He can’t keep up with the curriculum sequence
and pace of lessons or meet the demands of prescriptive school program.

The student: He has a ‘developmental delay’, a disability,
or is not ‘ready’ for the school’s program. Often,
family or social conditions are at fault.

The more capable others: They have not observed the learner closely,
problem-solved the learner’s difficulty, matched instruction
to the learner, made ‘informed’ decisions, or helped the
learner ‘get ready’.

What Is Learned Must Be Taught

An important argument in educational practice today centres on the debate
of whether learning can proceed naturally and without much intervention
or whether what is learned must be taught. While we agree that creating
an environment in which kids will naturally grow and learn is attractive,
both Hillocks (1999) and Vygotsky would maintain that teachers who believe
or enact only this vision are letting themselves off the hook. Both argue
that anything that is learned must be actively taught.

We make thousands of teaching decisions a day and all the decisions we
make are theoretical, based on what we value, on what we think we are
doing or should be doing, and on what we think will work toward those
purposes. We want our decisions to work to support learning for all of
our kids, even though some didn't do the reading, some did it and have
no clue, some are five chapters ahead, and all are at widely different
skill levels. What can we do so that our teaching is effective for all
of our students in ways that work and make sense to us and to the kids?
How can we teach so they can understand the purpose and use of what we
do together in class, so they can all develop new abilities built on the
skills they already possess, and so they can understand a higher purpose,
pattern, and sense to classroom work?

Powerful Teaching

George Hillocks maintains that teachers should and can possess specialised
knowledge of students, of particular content and tasks, and of how to
represent and teach this knowledge. Hillocks argues that ‘teaching is
a transitive verb’ and that it ‘takes both a direct and an indirect object’
(1995). In other words, when we teach, we teach something to somebody.
We need to know both our subject and student. We need to know how to teach
in general, and in particular situations with the particular skills called
for in that situation or with that text.

Shulman (1987) argues that there is a knowledge base for teaching and
that it includes the following:

knowledge of students

knowledge of the subject to be taught

general knowledge of teaching processes, management, and organisation
that ‘transcend the subject matter’

'pedagogical content knowledge’, which includes: curricular knowledge
of ‘materials and programs'; knowledge of how to teach particular kinds
of content; knowledge of educational contexts and situations; and knowledge
of educational ends, purposes, and values.

We'd include as ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ what we as teachers know
about our theoretical orientations toward learning, toward reading, toward
literature, and the like. When we know these things, then theory allows
practices to stem in a wide-awake way from an articulate and unified set
of principles. These principles can then lead us to scrutinise our teaching
and to up the ante on it, pushing us forward to more powerful teaching.

The Essential Vygotsky: A Theoretical Perspective

When you assign a task and the students
successfully complete it without help,
they could already do it. They have been taught nothing.

Zones of Development

Perhaps Vygotsky’s most influential ideas are those related to zones
of development. What a child can do alone and unassisted is a task that
lies in what Vygotsky calls the zone of actual development (ZAD). When
a teacher assigns a task and the students are able to do it, the task
is within the ZAD. They have already been taught and have mastered the
skills involved in that task. I remember many times in my own teaching
career when I made such an assignment and exulted at my teaching prowess
when the most excellent projects were submitted. Vygotsky wouldn't have
been so sanguine. He would say that the kids could already do what I asked
them to do, and I had taught them nothing.

The place where instruction and learning can take place is the
zone of proximal development (ZPD). Learning occurs in this cognitive
region, which lies just beyond what the child can do alone. Anything that
the child can learn with the assistance and support of a teacher, peers,
and the instructional environment is said to lie within the ZPD. A
child's new capacities can only be developed in the ZPD through collaboration
in actual, concrete, situated activities with an adult or more capable
peer. With enough assisted practice, the child internalises the strategies
and language for completing this task, which then becomes part of the
child's psychology and personal problem-solving repertoire. When this
is achieved, the strategy then enters the student's zone of actual development,
because she is now able to successfully complete the task alone and without
help and to apply this knowledge to new situations she may encounter.

Of course, there are assignments and tasks that lie beyond the ZPD, and
even with expert assistance the student is incapable of completing the
task. I have unwittingly given many assignments and assigned many books
during my career that were beyond the ZPD of most of my students. Such
assignments, no matter what the curriculum might proclaim, are acts of
hopelessness that lead to frustration. In fact, such texts are designated
by Analytical and Informal Reading Inventories to be at the student's
frustrational reading level. If you've taught books that are at many of
your students’ frustrational level, then you know that teaching
them lies in the teacher's frustrational level as well!

Vygotsky viewed teaching as leading development
instead of responding to it,
if teaching is in the ZPD.

Texts at the independent level are those the student can read alone (and
are therefore in the ZAD). Texts at the instructional level are those
that students can read with help, and through which students will learn
new content and new procedures of reading (because the demands of reading
that book lie in the ZPD – they can be learned with the appropriate assistance).
These are the kinds of texts students need to be reading. They must be
carefully chosen and matched to students, and they must be accompanied
with instructional assistance for developing strategies of reading. It
is important to remember that the difficulty of a particular text depends
on many factors: the student's purpose for reading, motivation, background
knowledge, how distant the content and ideas are from kids’ experience,
the vocabulary, the inference load (the amount and kind of inferences
required for understanding), student familiarity with the genre, the genre
expectations and the strategies that are required to comprehend it, understanding
of the author's purpose and so forth. Teaching can lead development when
students are able to be successful with support. Teaching of tasks that
cannot be successfully completed with assistance lie outside the ZPD.

Students develop new cognitive abilities when a teacher leads them through
task-oriented interactions. Depending on various factors, a teacher will
lend various levels of assistance over various iterations of task completion.
The goal is to allow the students to do as much as they can on their own,
and then to intervene and provide assistance when it is needed so that
the task can be successfully completed. Vygotsky stressed that students
need to engage in challenging tasks that they can successfully complete
with appropriate help. Happily, Vygotsky points out that teaching in such
a way develops the teacher just as attentive parenting matures the parent.

Learning always proceeds from the known to the new.
Good teaching will recognise and build on this connection.

A metaphor that has been used to describe this kind of teaching is ‘scaffolding’.
The student is seen as constructing an edifice that represents her cognitive
abilities. The construction starts from the ground up, on the foundation
of what is already known and can be done. The new is built on top of the
known.

The teacher has to provide this scaffold to support the construction,
which is proceeding from the ground into the atmosphere of the previously
unknown. The scaffold is the environment the teacher creates, the instructional
support, and the processes and language that are lent to the student in
the context of approaching a task and developing the abilities to meet
it.

Scaffolding must begin from what is near to the student's experience
and build to what is further from their experience. Likewise, at the beginning
of a new task, the scaffolding should be concrete, external, and visible.
Vygotskian theory shows that learning proceeds from the concrete to the
abstract. This is why math skills are learned from manipulatives, and
fractions from pies and graphs. Eventually these concrete and external
models can be internalised and used for abstract thought. One of the problems
with reading is that the processes are internal, hidden, and abstract.
There are many strategies (protocols, drama and visualisation strategies,
symbolic story representation) for making hidden processes external, visible,
and available to students so that they can be scaffolded to use and master
new strategies of reading.

Students have a need to develop and exhibit competence.
Teachers must assist them to develop competence as they engage in
challenging tasks in which they can be successful.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to bring the previously unmastered processes
of completing a task into the students’ ZAD so that they can do the task
without help. Reaching this point requires lots of support and practice
and is a significant learning accomplishment.

Vygotskian theorists stress that children need to engage in tasks with
which they can be successful with the assistance provided. They also stress
that the child needs to have strengths identified and built upon (in contrast
with the deficit model of teaching, in which a student's weaknesses are
identified and remediated), and requires individual attention from the
teacher.

Context and situation are also essential and integral to all learning.
So students need to be engaged in real everyday activities that have purpose
and meaning. To quote Brown, Collins, and DuGuid (1989):

A meaningful learning context is crucial. Learning
is purposeful and situated.

It is important that the teacher gradually releases responsibility to
the student until the task can be completed independently.

Learners can only begin to learn within their individual
zones of proximal development, current interests and present state
of being. But humane teaching can develop new interests,
new ways, of doing things, and new states of being.

Vygotsky wrote, ‘What the child can do in cooperation today he can do
alone tomorrow’ (1934). He also noted that ‘instruction is good only when
it proceeds ahead of development. It then awakens and rouses to life those
functions which are in a state of maturing, which lie in the zone of proximal
development. It is in this way that instruction plays an extremely important
role in development’ (1956).

In this way, we would critique natural-language-learning classrooms,
in which children are placed in nurturing environments where it is assumed
they will naturally grow and bloom. Though we know that many workshop
classrooms do provide expert assistance through mini lessons, and through
a variety of peer interactions and projects that can provide peer and
environmental assistance, we believe that such classrooms often fail to
push students to learn how to engage strategically with new text structures,
conventions of meaning making, and new ideas. (We are all speaking from
personal experience, and are critiquing our own practice in workshop settings.)
The teacher in such situations often fails to lend her full consciousness
to students or to set appropriate challenges, simply encouraging and allowing
students to pursue their own paths. We do not want our students to naturally
unfold into what they were supposedly ‘predestined’ to be, or imagined
to be predestined to be. We want them to develop the capacity and awareness
to choose who they will be and what they will do.

‘When Work Is Play for Mortal Stakes’

It's worth mentioning that Vygotsky stressed the importance of playfulness
and imaginary play to learning. In our own schools, there's an amazing
split between teachers who believe that learning should be fun, and those
who believe that learning should be hard work. Our interpretation of Vygotsky
is that he would agree with both parties (though primarily with the first
group): we think he'd maintain that teaching and learning should be play
that does ‘WORK’, by which we mean that the learning will have an immediate
application, function, and real-world use.

A Teaching Model based on Vygotsky

Student Responsibility->

Adult-Then Joint-Responsibility->

Self-Responsibility

Zone of Actual Development

Zone of Proximal Development

What the student can do on her own unassisted

Assistance provided by more
capable others: teacher or peer or environment:classroom structures
and activities

Hillocks draws heavily on the research on both student engagement and
potential and argues that:

The best learning is fun.

Engaged learning is fun because it is challenging, relevant, and purposeful
but is supported in a way that makes success possible.

Almost all students can and will learn given supportive teaching and
effective learning environments.

Models of Teaching and Learning:
Flowing from Theory

The Vygotskian-inspired, sociocultural-based, learning-centred model
is so radically different from the two most dominant models of teaching
and learning (teacher-centred and student-centred) that most people have
never considered it. This is because this new model is two-sided and requires
mutual effort and responsibility on the part of learners and teachers,
whereas the dominant models are one-sided and place nearly complete responsibility
for learning with the student. As a result, the two-sided model requires
a completely different kind of classroom and definition of teaching –
one that may not look at all like what we have all experienced during
our own schooling.

Because the dominant models of teaching and learning in our culture are
linear, one-sided models, it's been typical to consider students responsible
for learning: in the curriculum/teacher-centred model the teacher is an
adult who runs the show and transmits information to students, whose job
it is to ‘get it.’ In this transmission model the teacher provides an
information conduit to the student, who is solely responsible for receiving
and later retrieving this data. This model is referred to variously as
a teacher-centred, presentational, curriculum-centred, or an industrial
model of education.

Others argue that education should be ‘student-run’. Proponents of this
view often cite constructivist notions by arguing that learning is the
province of learners, who must necessarily construct their own understandings.
Knowledge is acquired by learners in the process of their self-initiated
inquiries and personal investigations. Again, it is the student who is
responsible. No one else can ‘do’ learning for them and their achievement
of new knowledge requires active involvement and personal exploration.
This progressive model is often seen in workshop types of settings in
which teachers provide an environment full of opportunities and materials
with which students may choose to engage. This model is often referred
to as student-centred, participatory, exploratory, or natural-process
learning.

An entirely different point of view is proposed by researchers, theorists,
and teachers influenced by Vygotskian psychology, and to some degree by
Bakhtinian notions of dialogism. Rogoff, Matusov, and White (1996) propose
to call this a ‘community of learners’ model in that, as Vygotsky suggests,
it involves both active learners and more expert partners, usually adults,
who will provide leadership and assistance to the less skilled learners
as they engage together in a community of practice. In this model, it
is the teacher who is responsible for students’ learning, or their failure
to learn.

Communities of practice attempt to create meaning and solve problems
in a real context. Rogoff, Matusov, and White write that learning is not
about ‘transmitting’ or ‘acquiring’ knowledge, but is about ‘transformation’,
namely about transforming the nature of one's participation in a collaborative
endeavour. As the learner's participation is transformed, for example,
he becomes a more active and expert member of the community of practice,
often moving from observer to participant to leader of collaborative activity.
But the more expert partner's participation will also be transformed as
she learns about new ways to teach and new ways to participate and how
to change her roles relative to the changing roles of others. Everyone
is learning and working together to achieve a common purpose that will
be useful beyond the world of school.

The community of learners instructional model supersedes the pendulum
entirely: it is not a compromise or a ‘balance’ of the adult-run and
children-run models. Its theoretical notion is that learning is a process
of transformation of participation in which both adults and children
contribute support and direction in shared endeavours (Rogoff, Matusov,
and White 1996, 389).

These authors and many others have argued forcefully that the sociocultural
context in which learning occurs, and the way in which something is learned,
are necessarily a part of the learning. Therefore, students learning according
to different models would learn in different situations and in different
ways. This would affect how they come to understand and participate with
different aspects of how information is represented and used. So, each
model results in learning of a very different kind.

Our goal is for students to develop a wide repertoire of reading strategies
that they can independently deploy in a wide variety of situations with
a wide variety of texts, and our ultimate purpose is that they use these
strategies to participate democratically in their communities and cultures.
We find that applying Vygotskian learning theory to our teaching is what
best helps us to meet these goals.

Ways of Assisting Readers through Their Zones of Proximal development:
Modes of Scaffolding